Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Visually impressive, surprisingly detailed world accompanied by some of the best soundtrack I've heard in a while. The card illustrations especially are some of the most beautifully drawn ones I've ever seen. My only real issue is that matches aren't challenging enough and can be easily facerolled through. There are very few occassions where you actually have to adjust the deck to counter the enemy. The game still suffers from annoying bugs, but I personally didn't encounter any major ones. There's one frustrating bug that prevents the enemy from ever finishing his turn, which requires a game restart. I also encountered a bug which prevented chests from being registered so they did not count towards unlocking an achievement. The save system is also a bit of a mess. Some choices aren't clear enough so you have no idea what your character is actually going to say, and if what's said is not what you meant to choose there's no going back - the game will auto-save right after the dialogue is finished. In addition, there are some side quests that allow you to either take an action or walk away; if you choose to walk away the quest will remain in the same location if you change your mind and decide to tackle the dilemma at a later stage, yet there are dialogues which if you choose to walk away the quest will not linger, meaning you can't come back to it later. Such decisions aren't conveyed clearly enough and there's no way to load to a previous state.

I enjoy playing Thronebreaker. it makes you think out side the box to complete challenges. I enjoy the different interactions of the cards and trying over again a couple times till you get it right. unlike Gwent, Thronebreaker gives you a two lane system for your cards instead of a three lane setup. I'm not sure why CD Projekt Red made this change but it works well and doesn't feel clunky, messy, or too simple either for a single player experience. This game makes me want to play more Gwent!

Even on hardest difficulty, the game is absurdly easy for people with experience in card / tactical games, some cards are just broken, lookin at you Black Rayla. Too many battles are just fillers, and to top it off second half of most matches is marked by slowdowns due to AI thinking (not enough apparently...) Map movement consists of clicking on bright green spots, nothing engaging there. Quality of life features in multiplayer gwent are not updated in here, so it feels a little rough around the edges. Sure to story is somewhat interesting, writing is good, but why not read a good book, which has those things even better, when all gameplay parts are just uninspired and unbalanced, the game itself is chore to play.

I want to love this game. The concept is so great: single player deck building card game with role playing elements and a deep story? Awesome. Unfortunately, it falls rather short. My biggest complaint is that the deck building is really quite shallow. I'm nearly done with the game, and am still mostly using the same cards that I've had for ages. The lack of variety in the player's cards is disappointing. On top of this, the card battles get quite repetitive - Chapter 4, in particular, suffers from some very lazy level design. The dog puzzle battle is just ... bad. The over-world "meta game" is also not that interesting. You basically run around clicking on resources with little flags in them and making binary choices with unclear consequences. Many of the golden chests contain avatars or cards that are unlocks for the multiplayer game -- what a slap in the face to someone who bought a single player game, to be unlocking rewards for an entirely separate game that I don't particularly want to play. The designers could have used these chests to unlock cool new cards in the single player game that I bought. On the positive side, the production values are fantastic -- lovely art, fantastic music, good voice actors. It's all great. Sadly, the mechanics just don't live up to the production values. I really hope CDPR make a sequel with better gameplay, and will happily buy it if they do! Until then, there are card-based games out there with much better mechanics: Hearthstone and Slay the Spire come to mind.

The story is very well written and by far the best part of the game imo, the gameplay is fun and there are no elements that stick out for being annoying or boring. The only "issue", the highest difficulty is still pretty easy i would say so that's not great if you're looking for a challenge, but the game is still very much worth playing. No questions asked.